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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29253981">Fix It</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwenyere/pseuds/elwenyere'>elwenyere</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 12:02:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,008</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29253981</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwenyere/pseuds/elwenyere</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Times Steve Imagined Fixing It + One Time He Tried</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Steve Rogers/Tony Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>115</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>POTS (18+) Stony Stocking 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Fix It</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphic_Futurist/gifts">Sapphic_Futurist</a>.</li>



        <li>In response to a prompt by
            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphic_Futurist/pseuds/Sapphic_Futurist">Sapphic_Futurist</a>  in the  <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/stony_stocking_2020">stony_stocking_2020</a>
          collection.
        </li>
    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story is a gift for Sapphic_Futurist, who provided these wonderful, irresistible prompts: "Captured by HYDRA (separately or together)" and "Steve and Tony see each other again for the first time after Civil War where everything hurts." I hope you enjoy, Sapph! And thank you to everyone who shares the world of this fic.</p><p>CW: Descriptions of the aftermath of torture</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>5.</p><p>Steve woke to the pressure of two callused fingertips resting against his carotid artery: the first touch he’d felt in days that wasn’t aiming to bruise or shred. It took a few moments to adjust his eyes to the shaft of fluorescent light falling in from the open door to his cell, but Steve already knew whose hands were brushing across his neck.</p><p>“Tony.”</p><p>The name rasped in his throat, the syllables catching and snagging on a hatchwork of torn tissue.</p><p>“Stay still,” Tony replied.</p><p>Tony’s hands moved to clasp Steve’s sides, and Steve couldn’t hold back a gasp at the sudden stab of pain through his ribs. He’d lost track of how long he’d been chained to the ceiling by his wrists, but the wrenches in his shoulders and back had eventually become monotonous enough that his brain had turned them into background noise. Now the tiniest shift in his position sent a spear slicing across his nerves.</p><p>“I know, Cap,” Tony said. “I know. Just a minute. Hold on.”</p><p>Steve had replayed the sound of that voice so many times in the months since Siberia – pressing it to surface of his memory like a needle until it traced a groove deep into his mind. It was probably inevitable that when he finally heard it again, he would do whatever it asked; so he did his best to breathe through each new slash of sensation as Tony held his weight and someone else – Colonel Rhodes, he thought – cut through the manacles around his wrists.</p><p>“Electrified,” Steve started to say, but the word cut off in a hiss when the metal bands snapped apart and Steve sagged forward into Tony’s arms.</p><p>“Will you shut up and just let me handle something for once, Rogers?” Tony muttered. “Quit trying to backseat-drive your own rescue.”</p><p>Tony was lowering him to the ground as he spoke, one hand cradling the back of his head.</p><p>“We’ve got evac incoming,” Tony said, his free hand moving over Steve’s arms and shoulders as he scanned for the worst injuries. “What’s your status, Cap?”</p><p>Steve fought back a grimace, concentrating on slowing down his shallow breaths. His newly released muscles were screaming in protest, but only along one side of his body: his left arm was recoiling like a snapped rubber band, while his right only prickled with pins and needles. He knew what that meant about the dull pressure in his torso and the black borders at the edges of his vision.</p><p>“I’m afraid this one is going to leave a mark, Captain,” one of the HYDRA guards had leered at him on their last visit to his cell.</p><p>And he must have been right, because the searching hands had reached the place on Steve’s abdomen where his uniform had been torn open by a crow bar, and Tony’s face had frozen in horror.</p><p>“Fuck,” Tony swore. “Hill, I need emergency medical <em>now</em>. Tell Helen to come down with the team.”</p><p>Steve couldn’t lift his head to look, but he could picture the image. He’d first seen it on the front lines, when a young French solider had gotten thrown into a tree by a landmine. Steve had pulled open the man’s jacket to check for wounds and watched the hemorrhage expanding across his midsection like a dark nebula.</p><p>“I’m sorry, Tony,” Steve managed.</p><p>“Don’t,” Tony snapped. “We are <em>not</em> doing that right now. Do you hear me? I do not grant you absolution, so you better stick around and fight for it, you stubborn bastard.”</p><p>I never wanted to leave, Steve meant to say. But when he opened his mouth, all he could hear was a wet huff of air.</p><p>“Fuck, Steve, don’t do this,” Tony muttered. “Stay with me.”</p><p>There was no request that Steve had longed more painfully to hear, and to receive it now, when he was rapidly losing all power to obey, was worse than any blow the HYDRA guard had managed to land. Steve had spent months trying to imagine his way back to Tony – tracing every moment when he could have made a different choice. When the nights got long, he ran through each one in his mind like stops on a train: one millimeter closer here, two drinks braver there, and maybe the sliding doors would have stayed open, instead of slamming shut with a horrible, metallic clang.</p><p>“Steve,” Tony choked out, “I forgive you. I forgave you so long ago. Please.”</p><p>And as Steve felt Tony’s hands cupping the sides of his face, he realized he must be imagining again. His mind was always trying to find another way to fix things, and so he must have dreamed about the death threats that had led him to this cell. Getting news of the plot against Stark Tower from Natasha’s sources, deciding to track down the lead himself, the unknown days of torture after it had turned out to be a trap: all of it must have all been in his head, because the versions of Tony who forgave him – the ones who said Steve’s name and caressed his cheek, as this Tony was doing – never turned out to be real. When Steve opened his eyes, he’d be curled up on the couch of a safe house in Kiev or folded into a bus seat on the way to Jodhpur, waking up to another day in exile.</p><p>“I love you,” Steve tried to say anyway, but he was already falling into darkness.</p><p> </p><p>4.</p><p>The first station on the track was deceptively close – a door that was still within reach if he could only bring himself to make the jump. Just one moment of feeling reckless, and Steve would throw the rogue Avengers’ cover out the window, pick up one of the hundreds of postcards he had sketched on the back of drug-store receipts and paper coasters (“wish you were here”), and slip it in the mail. Hours later, when Steve cracked the door to the shitty motel room in Gdansk, Tony would be standing by the window, and Steve would reach for him before he remembered why he couldn’t. To his surprise, Tony would reach back: one hand tangling roughly in Steve’s hair and the other gripping the front of his shirt. He would kiss hard enough to bruise, and Steve would take it all, whispering over and over, “whatever you want, Tony. Whatever you want.”</p><p> </p><p>3.</p><p>Or else he would type, “I miss you” into the flip-phone in the middle of the night, the sequence of keys as instinctive as the Stations of the Cross. Then something would make him jump – maybe Sam or Wanda jerking awake from another nightmare – and his thumb would slip as it hovered over the send button. He would spend hours lost in a sea of roiling panic, sure that he had torched the only bridge he had left, but when he came up for air, it would be to the buzz of the phone. “Then come home, you idiot,” the text would read, and Steve wouldn’t even bother to pack the clothes he had left strewn on the floor.</p><p> </p><p>2.</p><p>Further back, when Fury handed him the Winter Soldier’s files, he would drive straight to New York and tell Tony his suspicions. Even if Tony smiled when Steve walked out of the elevator – one of those thousand-watt grins that crinkled the lines around Tony’s eyes and squeezed a fist around Steve’s heart – Steve wouldn’t hesitate, wouldn’t be tempted to put it off until he had soaked up just a little more light. He would give himself no time to wonder whether those smiles could ever be his to keep.</p><p> </p><p>1.</p><p>A few seconds faster on a train in Austria, and his hand would close around Bucky’s: he would be so strong that the fall would never come.</p><p>       </p><p>+1.</p><p>When Steve did wake up, it wasn’t on a couch or a bus but in a hospital bed. He felt it before he saw it: the rough drag of overwashed cotton against his arms, the soft tug of plastic on the back of his hand, and the pit in his stomach that warned him of what was missing from the room.</p><p>“He was here, Steve,” Natasha said. She had been standing by the window, but she walked over to perch at the foot of his bed as she spoke, one hand resting against his shin. “He didn’t leave your side once until Helen said you were out of the woods.”</p><p>“And we all agreed that what you did was really fucking stupid, so the healing has already begun,” Sam added from a chair to Steve’s left. He reached forward to give Steve’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m getting a little tired of falling asleep in your hospital rooms, by the way. This shit is bad for my neck.”</p><p>“Sorry,” Steve rasped.</p><p>“Yeah, I don’t think we’re the people you want to say that to,” Sam replied gently.</p><p>“You should call him,” Wanda agreed, handing Steve a small plastic cup of water. “There’s no need for you both to suffer this much.”</p><p>Steve grimaced as he spun the cup slowly in his hands.</p><p>“If Tony wanted to hear from me, he would have stuck around,” he said finally.</p><p>Wanda and Natasha exchanged a pointed look, and Sam tilted back in his chair to stare up at the ceiling.</p><p>“Team needs a goddamn marriage counselor,” he muttered to himself.</p><p>“Look, Steve,” Natasha said, “Tony bought this hospital in under an hour and flew in a hand-picked staff so that you could get the best medical care completely off the grid. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that he might not be disappointed to get a text.”</p><p>Steve swallowed past the lump in his throat.</p><p>“We’ll go see if we can rustle up some better food than that travesty of a mac-and-cheese dinner they were bringing around earlier,” Sam offered, rising to his feet along with Wanda and Natasha. “While we’re gone, maybe you can think about why you kept muttering his name the whole time they were prepping you for surgery.”</p><p>The door closed behind them, leaving Steve alone with his nerves and the familiar pressure of the plastic phone in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he typed out a message, his fingers shaking only slightly over the keys: <em>Tony. I know you already saved my life, and I have no right to ask. But if you’d be willing to see me when I’m not bleeding internally, there are some things I’d really like to say. </em></p><p>It was another minute before he could hit send, the panic rising like a molten wave through his chest. Finally, he pressed the button and let his head fall back on the pillow, trying to resist the urge to start counting each second as it went by. It could be hours before he heard anything, he told himself, and a long wait didn’t necessarily mean a refusal. This wasn’t that different from the months he’d already spent waiting for the phone to ring, and if he could survive that –</p><p>His train of thought was interrupted by the buzz of an incoming message: <em>The park downtown, tomorrow at noon. If you try to rush your discharge, I’ll have Romanov drug you.</em></p><p>Steve reeled momentarily at the riot of emotions running through his head: a heady thrill at the note of familiarity, a rush of adrenaline at the prospect of seeing Tony again so soon, a surge of guilt that he was asking Tony to drop everything again, when he had already gone through so much trouble.</p><p><em>Are you sure you can come back on such short notice? </em>he typed back, and this time he barely had to wait for a reply.</p><p><em>I’m staying at the hotel down the street.</em> Steve stared at his screen in momentary confusion before a second buzz made his heart leap straight into his throat. <em>I guess I never actually figured out how to let you go.</em></p>
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